Are 200 Million Streaming Subscribers Enough to Survive? Perhaps Not Anymore

A hundred million streaming subscribers isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? 200 million subscribers. Then again, 200 million subs may not even be enough these days.

That, or “possibly more,” could be the new benchmark for a streaming service to succeed, a New York Times poll of top entertainment executives found. Executives interviewed include Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Liberty Media’s John Malone, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, Prime Video head Mike Hopkins, IAC chairman Barry Diller, Comcast chief Brian Roberts, and “numerous other owners and senior executives of major media companies.”

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These guys know what they’re talking about — even Chapek. (Joking! We’re joking!)

“If you’re going to be a full entertainment service with live sports and tent-pole blockbusters today, 200 million is a number that can give you the scale with the hope for growth over time,” Hopkins, who is also the former CEO of Hulu, told the newspaper.

Amazon does not disclose its number of Prime Video subscribers, though we’ve known for a few years now that the number is north of 200 million. The NYT says Hopkins pegged the current number as “well above 200 million” and “growing.” The vast majority of people with Prime Video subscriptions have access through an overall Prime membership — the one that gets you free, fast shipping.

Chapek, who both succeeded and preceded Bob Iger’s two tenures as Disney CEO, said the 200-million mark means “you’re big enough to compete.” By that math, only Netflix (270 million subscribers), Disney (Disney+, Disney+ Hotstar, Hulu, ESPN+ combine for 228.6 million subscriptions), and Amazon Prime Video qualify.

None of this bodes well for Max, Paramount+, and Peacock. Apple TV+ is kind of an outlier — it’s small but nimble, and has the financial backing of the richest publicly-traded company (by market cap) on Earth. In other words, it doesn’t exactly have Netflix’s burden.

What is that exactly, you ask?

“It’s a tall order to entertain the world,” Sarandos said. “You have to do it with regularity and dependably.”

No one does that better than Netflix, which is why it has the industry’s best churn rate.

“When you finish ‘Baby Reindeer,’ there’s something else just as good,” Sarandos continued. “I worry that this notion of these other services, that they have nothing to watch problem, and that once you do a show and then you drag it out over 10 weeks or doing one episode at a time, you still end up in the same place, which is there’s nothing to watch after it.”

Burn.

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